Office Delve was the first product to use the Office Graph – an attempt to surface the nodes and edges of documents and people to build some intelligence.

Office Graph became Microsoft Graph and found lots of developer love.

Delve had to choose how to continue to exist – I suspect the team looked at the usage of how people that actually used Delve and studied how they used Delve.

Disclaimer

Please note - I have no particular inside knowledge of what Team Office is working on regarding Delve. I just wanted to write this, in 2019, because a good friend asked me - hey do you use Delve, do you like it? I am also NOT implying team Office is cutting Delve - as far as I know, they are maintaining it as it currently is. In fact, if I had known what they are working on - I wouldn’t have been able to write this post.

I do know from SharePoint uservoice - that there seems to be some work happening on taxonomy and metadata. So I figure I should write this blog post now.

So how does Delve work?

So a few years ago, I suspect they settled on what they thought was the killer idea – Delve shows you “people around you” and “documents around you”

They found that if they could show YOU the documents that PEOPLE AROUND YOU are working on – that must be documents you want to see.

Today, that’s pretty much the only scenario that Delve works really well for - if I am looking for the document that I know my colleague was working on last Friday but I don’t know where it was saved. Delve will tell me.

There was a second feature of delve - Boards and favourites. But as the product evolved around how it is being used - the boards idea takes a dramatic backseat.

How I think Delve should have worked

it should have been the cross Office 365 #tags management system, powered by Search and Graph. Providing a one-stop definition for folksonomy and taxonomy as both a destination, but also the interface where a process librarian owns and curates their tag collection.

There was a secondary idea – Delve gave us “Boards” where people can add documents to a board – think Pinterest, but for documents, and people, and office objects.

So now imagine #usergroup tag shows you emails, documents and people involved with running the monthly company usergroup.

That’s damn useful. Surface it in SPFx search webpart. Use it to show a most recently added documents list or appear in a mega menu.

What I think what team Office should have built, is to improve and combine

Improve Delve Boards and combine

SP Document Metadata taxonomy tags

SP Folksonomy tags

Yammer hashtags

Teams hashtags

Exchange/Outlook hashtags and categories

Tags across Todo, Planner

Tags across Stream

This way – we can surface a collection of documents explicitly labelled with tags – across the entire company.

Say, if you tag #induction and this article will automatically appear in an #induction board in Delve. That would have been more magical.

Or if an OHS #worksafety email was sent and tagged - it would appear in the Delve Board.

Appoint specific users to own the boards – so they are the tag librarian making sure unsuitable links is hidden from that tag. They own the boards - so they are the curators. They can decide if objects are automatically included, how the objects are sorted, and which objects should be pinned to the top.

I think this isn’t a simple goal - this is the longer path – requiring Team Office to work on some sort of inter-office tag/hashtag/metadata system. I don’t believe it is possible to implement this across every product and force everyone to use the same list - but I do believe it is possible to aggregate them at the Search results stage and control collections via Delve Boards.

I think it would give Delve a strong reason and a decent second chance at being a unique Office 365 go to destination. And tie up a lot of loose ends at the same time.

It’s 2019, my hope with Delve Next

is that we will see Me, then Tags (then People) - and the tags are curated boards of content collected across all of Office 365 via every tag and hashtag system we have.

I wanted to write about two free upcoming events regarding Office 365 and SharePoint happening very soon in Sydney Australia, both events are free, but you’ll need to register.

First: Office 365 Saturday Sydney is this Saturday October 13!

on October 13 - that is this upcoming Saturday! We will be gathering at the Microsoft Sydney Reactor which is located above Wynyard station in the city. This would be… the 8th Saturday event we have ran since the earliest SharePoint Saturday.

Sat., 13 Oct. 2018, 9:00 am: Welcome to the 2018 edition of SharePoint & Office 365 Saturday Sydney! This is a free event where we learn and celebrate Office 365. We have a dozen local, national and international speakers...

Second: Office Developer Bootcamp is Friday November 2

This was an oversubscribed event in 2017 - join Microsoft evangelists and Office 365 Development MVPs for a day of catching up to the latest state of Office APIs and wizardry. We are on the ground covering your questions from Azure Functions, Flow, Microsoft Graph, SPFx, new SharePoint and Teams APIs to obscure API webhooks and cheapest ways to make Office 365 work for you and light up like a Christmas tree.

This is a full day Friday event held at Microsoft North Ryde, so you need to talk to your manager to get the day off and bring your laptop for a day of hacking.

The Global Office 365 Developer Bootcamp is a free, one-day training event led by Microsoft MVPs with support from Microsoft and local community leaders. The bootcamps will provide hands-on labs for deep learning, and a comprehensive view of all key technologies and products on the Office 365 platform.

Whether we see you on the Saturday or the Friday, come visit and drop in and say hello. This is absolutely the best time to meet most of the Office 365 experts in Sydney and wrap up 2018.

I want to end this announcement with a lit Christmas tree. Hope to see you very soon.

Plan

But a quick read of the article it targets DevOps doing zipdeploy with Azure CLI, REST or PowerShell. There's nothing for a yet-to-be-developer. What I wanted to do was drag and drop zip deploy (so I quickly reached out to Ling Toh and turns out she says she does it all the time).